'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács

Monday, March 31, 2014

Alex Callinicos on the Ukraine crisis

The reaction of the Western left to this enormous crisis has been, to put it
mildly, confused. Far too many (including some who should know better) have been
willing to cast a blind eye at or find excuses for Russia’s military
intervention. The reasons for this attitude are, in ascending order of
respectability, Stalinist nostalgia, exaggeration of the role of the extreme
right in the anti-Yanukovych movement, and the search for some counterweight to
American power. The net result is a revival of what used to be called campism in
the days of the Cold War—seeing states in conflict with the US and its allies
(then the USSR, now usually Russia and China) as in some sense progressive
allies of the left. None of this has much to do with the revolutionary Marxist tradition. The
fate of Ukraine preoccupied Trotsky during the last year of his life in 1939-40,
as Europe rolled into the Second World War. Distilling the results of prolonged
debates among Russian Marxists (which continued after October 1917) in which
Lenin consistently insisted on the necessity of defending the right to
self-determination of oppressed nations, Trotsky defended “the independence of a
United Ukraine” (ie incorporating Polish Galicia and Volhynia) even if that
meant “the separation of Soviet Ukraine from the USSR”—and this, remember, at a
time when he was vehemently arguing that the Soviet Union was still a
“degenerated workers’ state” that revolutionaries should defend against Western
imperialism. Quoting Trotsky can be a religious exercise, but his views are worth bearing
in mind when considering supposed Marxists who dismiss the idea of Russian
imperialism as an “abstraction” or even advocate the partition of Ukraine.
Putin’s apologists on the Western left must explain how their stance squares
with the right to national self-determination. If they defend Crimea’s
(extremely dubious) claim to separate from Ukraine, where do they stand on the
long-standing Chechen struggle for independence from Russia, brutally crushed by
Putin? And what will they say if Russian forces move into eastern Ukraine and
become mired in crushing the nationalist insurgency that this would almost
certainly provoke? Of course, the US remains the dominant imperialist power on a world scale.
And of course, it is thoroughly hypocritical for Obama and his secretary of
state John Kerry to denounce Putin’s seizure of Crimea, forgetting Washington’s
interventions in its own backyard such as the October 1962 naval blockade of
Cuba or the December 1989 invasion of Panama (a state, incidentally, carved out
of Colombia at Teddy Roosevelt’s behest at the beginning of the 20th century).
But from a Marxist perspective, imperialism is about more than American
power. The classical theory of imperialism is, more than anything else, a theory
of intra-capitalist competition. Imperialism is a system, the form
taken by capitalism when the concentration and centralisation of capital bring
about the fusion of economic competition among capitals and geopolitical
competition among states. Putin’s actions express exactly this
imperialist logic, combining geopolitical preoccupations (above all, blocking
NATO expansion) with economic motivations (fear that Russian firms will be
squeezed out of the Ukrainian market by European rivals). The confused left response to the Ukrainian crisis is in part the result of
an optical illusion created by the so called “unipolar moment” of apparent US
global dominance after the end of the Cold War. Particularly in the light of
Afghanistan and Iraq, American power has seemed so overwhelming and so malign
that everything must be subordinated to resisting it. But this was always
precisely an illusion. US hegemony has always been contested, reflecting the
fact that imperialism involves a hierarchical distribution of power among
competing capitalist states. This fact is becoming more important now. The relative decline of US power that has become evident since Iraq and the
crash is opening up a period of more fluid competition, in which the weaker
imperialist states begin to assert themselves. Putin’s strategy has reflected
this for some time. Potentially a much more important conflict is developing in
Asia, as China’s economic rise encourages its ruling class to flex their muscles
geopolitically, in particular by building up the military capabilities to
exclude the US Navy from the “Near Seas” along their coasts. The clashes between
China and Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands are harbingers of more
to come. In this era of growing inter-imperialist rivalries political clarity among
revolutionary Marxists is vital. In New York, London and Moscow the main
enemy is at home (a slogan Karl Liebknecht coined in response to a great
inter-imperialist war whose centenary we will soon be remembering). But
acknowledging this is no reason to apologise for our own rulers’ rivals.
Imperialism is a hydra-headed beast. It needs to be killed, not merely one of
its manifestations.Full article 'Imperial Delusions' (from the forthcoming International Socialism journal) online here, while Tariq Ali also has quite a good article on the Ukraine here, as does Mehdi Hasan hereEdited to add: See also Rob Ferguson and Sabby Sagall in the new Socialist Review